Garet Oneshot
by UltaFlame
Summary: Garet wonders if he'll ever be able to marry and have children. Might not make much sense.


I am a Sandshipper – don't let this fool you.

I don't own Golden Sun, or any of its characters or other such things.

After having finished writing this, I have no idea what to make of it. But, hey, at nearly three thousand words it's my longest single piece of literature ever willingly written. Enjoy.

The story

Garet knew his outward personality could be summed up in a few simple words. Big, knuckled headed oaf. Yet, he knew, all people had their masks. Garet never wanted to be thought a fool, because he wasn't. True enough thought it is that there were people with far more brains than him, but Garet often found himself noticing things others overlooked.

For example, there was a time in a small mining town that had been flooded, and Garet, Isaac, Ivan, and Mia had gone adventuring inside the mine caves. Everyone had laughed at (and, truthfully, been quite annoyed with) Garet when he'd kicked over a log, which had caused a large boulder to chase after them. Nobody seemed to notice – or, if they did, they elected not to speak of it – that because Garet had caused the incident, they were able to obtain a very useful item.

Other than that, they'd also found the last of the 'guardian statues' that had flooded the village. Garet had, effectively, led to the eventual success of their mission. See, he wasn't a complete doofus. There were other such examples, but nobody really feels like listening to example after example of Garet's unsung heroics.

Let's skip forward in time, just a bit. Contigo, post Jupiter-lighting. Garet sat on the flight-capable Lemurian Ship Felix's group had obtained. The Mars Adept wasn't sure what, exactly, had happened to their own Lemurian Ship, but flying ships were definitely cool, so he didn't mind. Garet had, like Isaac, and the rest of their small group, noticed and had worried for Sheba, back at Venus Lighthouse.

But when Garet saw the small, young girl head down to the core-room of the ship (which seemed suspiciously like a cave to him), something clicked in his mind. Garet's grandfather was getting old. He would eventually pass on, and sooner or later the position of Mayor of Vale would have to be passed to one of the children of that old windbag's grandchildren.

'That old windbag's grandchildren' namely being Garet himself, his sister Kay, and his younger brother Aaron. Aaron was a lost cause, just by being the lousy twerp that he was, and Kay scared everyone she came into contact with. Between her freakish obsession with her (tiny) garden, and her tendency to go off and scream about the lightest thing, people shied away from Garet's sister.

That, effectively, left carrying the bloodline forward to Garet. For perhaps the first time in Garet's life he felt some sort of important responsibility. His mind kicked into gear. To come up with a list of girls Garet knew, and then cut off the names of those already married, far too old, his sister or his mom, and girls far too young for a man of Garet's age, the names left would be… Jenna, and Mia. If you wanted to stretch it a bit, Sheba, too.

Garet had at one point or another fostered crush-like feelings for both girls, but as previously pointed out, he wasn't stupid. He thought. Garet didn't enjoy the thought of simplifying peoples' personalities, yet, if put into that context, his own personality reflected a steady flame. A sort of campfire that kept its fellow campers warm. Jenna was different, flaring at different moments, hardly controllable, but not destructive at its core.

Mia was like a peaceful ocean. Like an ocean, however, she could quickly, and perhaps suddenly, turn around and throw a storm at you. Perhaps the storm wasn't meant for you and you simply got caught up in it, or maybe the reasons for such viciousness are as yet unexplained, but the point remains. Thinking from this line of thought, Garet pulled up a few more facts.

When you get a fire, what do you do to instantly put it out? You dump water on it. At first glance, it may seem like an unfair, extremely one-sided equation, but upon closer inspection, you'd notice that the water evaporates, if not quite so swiftly as the fire is doused. Neither combatant, in this case, comes out on top, as both end up irreversibly damaged in the end.

You might think that two fires would feed upon each other and thus grow stronger… and maybe it would be the case for a short while, yet eventually the two blazes would burn the other out, and, once again, both are left at a loss. Garet was truly and completely stumped. No matter which way he thought of it, he didn't know a single person with whom he could see himself living a lifetime with.

Elementally, his alignment would, shockingly, go best with Ivan, or Sheba's. To take the smallest spark, the barest last memory of a roaring flame's life, and add a brushing wind, if there is anything left to burn, a fire will re-take. Garet had always assumed that was why he and the little shrimp had always gotten along so well.

As wind sets withered fires alight once more, Fire coaxes the air higher, teasing it until it goes to heights it wouldn't see on its own. They complement each other, despite their differences. Sure, a chilling breeze makes unbearable heat tolerable, and maybe a roaring campfire soothes the cold of the night. Still, there is something in the air that allows fires to exist.

It made sense, at the very least to Garet, if nobody else. Garet had tried. It was impossible to light a fire underneath water. Indeed, underneath soil, as well. Which meant, if cut off from a source of wind and air, Fire can, simply, not exist. Garet's mind slowed to a halt. His thoughts met inner silence. He'd done a lot of thinking about the topic, and he'd realized something.

Despite all this theorizing (if his thoughts could be called theory) he hadn't gotten anywhere in deciding something for himself. To his mind, Sheba was just too young, however pretty it might be evident she'll become, and he'd just concluded to himself that Jenna and Mia were not good matches for himself. He had begun to frustrate himself, he realized.

He stumbled upon a stray thought, made it coherent in his mind, and the basic meaning was that he recognized such behavior from somewhere. He looked around at his surroundings. Sheba had come back to the deck, Piers was at the helm, they were flying above the waters, Ivan was reading his mind –

Ivan was doing what? Garet turned to look at the Jupiter Adept, shook his head in the universal way of saying 'No,' felt Ivan's presence leave his head, and continued looking around. Ivan was looking shocked, and was walking over to Mia, who had been staring at the water below. As his eyes settled on Felix, Garet noticed Ivan and Mia head inside, where Isaac was.

Garet chuckled as he remembered Isaac. To the Venus Adept's immediate dismay, the four had discovered he had an aversion to ships, and their rocking motions. Almost as soon as they had left Lalivero on their Lemurian Ship, Isaac had collapsed to the deck, his arms clutching his sides in discomfort. Garet had laughed, earned some sharp stares, knew that someone else would have laughed if he hadn't, and helped carry their then-leader inside the ship.

Garet laughed outright at the memory, and realized that the only two blood-related people on board (Felix and Jenna, who Garet had, in his own mind, begun referring to as the Ponytail Siblings, as they both wore variants of the hairstyle) were staring at him as if he might have been going crazy. Remembering suddenly that neither had been with them on their travels to that point, Garet waved them off, assuring them he was quite sane and capable of helping them light the Mars beacon.

Apparently satiated, Felix nodded and returned to his usual self. Garet noticed the almost-distant look and figured he was brooding over another subject or some matter of detail that really had little bearing in the long run. That's when Garet remembered he had been wondering where he had remembered his own behavior from.

Still looking at Felix, Garet slapped his hand to his forehead and mentally 'duh'ed himself. Felix was always brooding, thinking heavily on some subject or another, and his facial expression often shifted to one of a silent frustration. Garet remembered the habit from when they were younger. Garet couldn't help but think that their new (in Garet's case, anyway) leader was already rubbing off on Garet.

Which was something he really couldn't afford. If his suspicions were true and he was the only real hope of furthering his family's bloodline in the form of children, then he couldn't waste time being a mental shut-in and find a solution to the problem. Garet had no real wish to be mayor of vale – or to hold any position of responsibility, but family was important to him.

But it really seemed hopeless, to Garet. Two bad choices, who would probably be taken by others in the group any way, and… nothing else. Even if Garet did find a good option, he had few easily evident qualities that would attract said person. Garet resolved to wait things out. Worse comes to worst, and if it's still possible at the time, he would just have to wait for Sheba to grow up.

Then he realized that situation could go just as horribly wrong as the fire with fire, and the fire with water predicaments he had thought up before. True, wind can restart a fire, but it was also capable of over-extending it, in a sense. If the fire had no restraint, and the wind blew hard enough, the fire would suddenly become far beyond control, even if it wished to be brought back under control.

Garet knew Jenna and Mia well enough to know how they would go together. Well, predictably, at any rate. But he didn't know Sheba well, if he knew her at all. He could probably ask Felix his opinion on the matter, and he might not think anything of it, but eventually the news would spread to the others in the group. And, after all, Sheba was so much younger than Garet.

Ivan was a calm wind, essentially, if you wanted to put his personality into the context Garet had put the others into. Garet noticed an odd pattern, however, in differences between Felix's group, and Isaac's. As previously stated, Mia was an ocean. If she was an ocean, Piers was a glacier. Differences were already stated between Garet and Jenna.

Going from Garet's memories, Isaac was like a pleasant expanse of fine soil, perhaps some sort of peaceful meadow. Felix, on the other hand, was like a forest. Impossible to see far into from the outside, and probably difficult to tell which way you were going once you were inside. In no way secretive, yet somehow impossible to navigate unless you had a perfect map and never made a mistake.

So if there was such difference between the Mercury Adepts, the Venus Adepts, and even the Mars Adepts, then how different could Ivan be from Sheba? It was a scary thought, and Garet seriously entertained the thought of just giving up on ever finding a woman for himself. Garet wished he possessed Master Hama's strange ability to sense the future.

He began to get apprehensive, his worry about his future marital status spreading. If no heir to the title of Mayor eventually came, what would happen? Would the people begin a sort of civil war, debating, maybe violently, amongst themselves who should take the title? Or was his thoughts wrong, and would some, probably twisted, person actually find his sister attractive, despite her temper and scariness?

Would Aaron be able to find a significant other when Garet could not? Garet didn't know what he'd do if such turned out to be true. Aaron was such a twerp, and worse, he was annoying. Garet could not see anybody ever taking a liking to him once the kid got beyond the childishly cute stage. Silently, Garet often hoped his brother would have trouble making friends as he grew.

Nearly almost as much as Garet wished his family, including Aaron and Kay, would live safely and in happiness. Garet stopped again, his mind beginning to reel. He was seriously becoming just like Felix. He felt slightly horrified at the thought. If he were to become like Felix, then he might begin pushing away his friends and then he'd be lonely, and that'd be terrible.

And, not to mention, the exact opposite end to which his thoughts had begun with the intent of reaching. Thinking back onto his quickly becoming incoherent memories of his recent thoughts, Garet decided to just do things the easy way. For now, he would not say anything, would drop the subject. At that moment, it became a worry for another day.

That other day came just the following morning of Mars's lighting. Jenna's parents, and Isaac's dad, had been found. That came as a shock to Garet. He'd heard, of course, that they lived when Isaac's group met Felix's. Yet when they arrived at Prox and no evidence of the Valeans could be found, Garet had silently assumed that they'd gone to the lighthouse.

And when the eight Adepts found no trace of the three older people on their way, Garet feared they had died. They'd spent a night camping as soon as the lighthouse came within sight. When Garet woke up in the morning, he saw Gaia Falls. Only, no water was falling, and beyond the edge frightening bolts of lightning constantly soared as if exemplifying a crack in the world's foundation.

If Garet had had any doubts as to why the Proxians had done what they did, he had none after that point. He'd be desperate as well, having stared at the empty mass of nothing that stretched out before him for a lifetime. With a chill having little to do with the freezing snow around them, Garet felt a chill trickle its way to his core.

Burning pain on his cheek broke him from his trance. Confused momentarily, it took Garet's wits a moment to recover. When they did, he realized Felix had slapped him. Stammering, no words coherent, Garet silently obeyed when Felix ordered him to stand up, and to get moving. But that's irrelevant. Garet fought alongside the others when the wise one called his miracle dragon. Felix lit Mars's beacon, and Garet soon found himself waking up on a comfortable, strangely not freezing bed in Prox's inn.

A thought came, unbidden. Garet still needed to carry on his family. It was this moment that Garet realized his true reason for wishing to find a woman. Garet was trustworthy, but not all that responsible. He came to a relatively startling conclusion that, instead of feeling the need to carry his family's blood from his generation to the next, he just wanted to be a father. The realization made him fall out of his bed.

Isaac's father chose that moment to descend the staircase. "I was wondering when one of you would wake up, but did you really need to cause such noise," was the whispered question. Standing, Garet's only response was a nod.

"I'm hungry." And then the Venus Adept motioned for the younger man to follow. Garet almost drooled when he smelled fresh cooking. "Did I eat last night?" Garet tried to recall the events after he wound up back in Prox. Somehow, they'd made the trek in one night, even with three very nearly dead parents to slow them down. He remembered no food.

"I would not know." And then Garet's slow-in-the-morning mind suddenly jolted awake, and he jumped. His expression almost seemed to scream 'GHOST,' which is what he looked to have seen. "Ah, well. I'm sure Puelle will explain it to you. Honestly, what he said made little sense. Aren't you hungry? I was told you all collapsed and didn't eat a single bite last night."

Having arrived at a seat with food in front of it, the shock of a living Kyle faded, and the fact that he was starving took precedence over all else in his mind. Ignoring all table manners, Garet began to devour whatever was placed in front of him. Slowly, and without his realizing it, seven other equally hungry Adepts joined him in the meal, although most ate with more regard to social rules than Garet had.

Garet felt sleepy again after eating, so he went back to the bed he'd woken up on. He found Kyle standing alone. "Ah, Garet," he said, having noticed the tall red-head. "I heard you were having some issues with yourself." Confused, Garet said nothing for a moment, pondering the thought.

Coming up with a blank, he asked, quite simply, "what?" And then he remembered an event on his first boarding of the Lemurian Ship. Garet's mind quit working when he came to the revelation that he had begun thinking of the ship simply as 'the Lemurian Ship' instead of 'Felix's Lemurian Ship'.

"Time changes a man, Garet. Why, looking at my son I realize that. I managed to speak to Ivan before he got too hungry." Shaking his head, the older man sighed, "Garet, you're over thinking things. Give it time. You'll come into an understanding eventually."

Garet listened to Kyle explain a few things about life and how people got together, and somewhere along the line, Garet realized his friend's father had explained how he and his wife had gotten together. Garet stopped listening when Kyle began to worry out loud about Dora's condition, and decided one thing for himself: Garet would stop worrying, because it wasn't like him, and would wait for a simple answer to present itself.


End file.
